Fantastic Beasts Franchise Seemingly Dead at Last

Fantastic Beasts may finally have come to an end.

The fate of the Harry Potter prequel franchise has been up in the air for some time now. The third film was released in April of this year, with the worst U.S. and worldwide box office performance of the series thus far. Actor Eddie Redmayne, who plays Newt Scamander in the films, admitted last month that he hadn’t heard anything about a fourth film — something that any remaining fans immediately realized didn’t bode well for the franchise.

With all the chaos happening at Warner Bros. Discovery following the merger this year, it’s been anyone’s guess what might happen with Harry Potternext. But Variety reported that new CEO David Zaslav recently spoke to shareholders about the future of the company as a whole, simultaneously saying they want to focus on franchises while claiming “we haven’t done a Harry Potter movie in 15 years.”

While that isn’t exactly true, his lack of acknowledgement of the Fantastic Beasts franchise within the world of Harry Potter pretty heavily suggests there are currently no plans to move forward with a new installment.

On the surface, it may initially feel like a win. As beloved as Harry Potter was, J.K. Rowling’s devotion to spreading anti-trans rhetoric has been a major disappointment to many fans. The Fantastic Beasts franchise in particular also ran into controversy between Ezra Miller’s numerous run-ins with the law, as well as the accusations of domestic violence against Johnny Depp, which resulted in a UK court officially ruling he could be labeled a “wife-beater” without it amounting to defamation.

But Zaslav ultimately went on to suggest the company may want to work with Rowling on some new addition to the world of Harry Potter in the future, which ultimately slips right in with the company’s commitment to canceling so many of its diverse and inclusive programs ever since Discovery took things over.

Whether anything happens with that or not remains to be seen, but for the time being, Fantastic Beasts, at least, seems to be no more.